Losing ground: Another look at Made in L.A.
ROSS, ROBERT J.S.
An inspiring if flawed documentary, Made in L.A. follows three Los Angeles sweatshop workers as their lawsuit against a lowprice retail label and the community campaign to support them...
...and industry press...
...His choice for secretary of labor, Hilda Solis of California, is well known to the labor movement and to anti-sweatshop campaigners as an advocate for low-wage workers and for immigrants...
...Tellingly, central figures such as Florence Kelley and Frances Perkins eventually understood that union strength and state regulation were the paths to real protection for their "clients...
...trade representative, former Dallas mayor Ron Kirk, is more in line with the views of Obama's early, close liberal globalizer advisers, like Austan Goolsbee...
...Whether or not the new president finally commits to a strong Employee Free Choice Act, Solis will be a voice on its behalf...
...Hernandez has grown in the course of time covered by the film, but the strategies or power of the anti-sweatshop movement have not...
...In 2000, at a plant I visited in Managua, cameras were trained on the guarded entrance to the jeans factory and workers were closely questioned if they were seen talking to the union activists at the gate...
...Thus, since 2001, when the Forever 21 campaign began, metro L.A...
...The GWC expressed the hope that "down the road, workers will want to join unions or create associations," while acknowledging, "but that will take a long time...
...Nor is the lack of a union as a result of the campaign necessarily or uniquely a criticism of the GWC staff...
...Barack Obama's new administration will certainly be more mindful of worker rights in its domestic and international economic policy than the last one...
...The number has declined not because conditions improved but because the industry has left the United States...
...Female activist graduate students at my own Clark University International Development program had a tremendous turnout at a showing...
...The cohort of activists around Jane Addams's Hull House, for example, embodied both the service orientation and the pro-labor sentiment of today's worker center advocates...
...deserves most of the praise and the prizes it has earned...
...At the turn of the nineteenth century similar problems for the immigrant working class—long hours, low pay, miserable conditions—brought socially minded professionals to much the same conclusion as that of the staff of the GWC...
...The race to the bottom is domestic as well as international...
...This is not for want of motivation—its 2007 annual report discusses its aspirations for increasing worker involvement on the board...
...This admiration for the film comes, I believe from a cultural bias that Nelson Lichtenstein has also identified in his history of the labor movement in the second half of the twentieth century...
...The lack of worker-based unions in the L.A...
...No doubt this is the reason large segments of the American labor movement are more pro-immigrant than in previous eras...
...the GWC is really a creature of the world of foundations and professionals...
...Worker centers began in the early 1990s...
...Workers' rights in the collective sense, labor rights, the rights of groups of workers to association and voice, is not so central to the American cultural tradition, and they are below the radar in this film, set aside in our love for this film's story...
...In southern China's export factories, young women live in walled or fenced factory complexes, in singlesex dormitories, crowded in rooms with manytiered bunk beds, and they work even longer hours than the workers in L.A...
...shows us why L.A...
...In the 1990s, I calculated in Slaves to Fashion that the number of U.S...
...series, the film received even more praise in 2008 when it won an Emmy for "Outstanding Continuing Coverage of a News Story-Long Form...
...Whenever people stand up for their rights and recoup their dignity, people of good will should cheer them on and struggle alongside them...
...Still, there is a possibility of a new vision of rights and citizenship...
...When the Forever 21 campaign began, the Latina women in L.A...
...The commitment of the staff of the Garment Worker Center (GWC) that organized the Forever 21 campaign, the five years of stick-to-itiveness by the filmmakers, and the poignant human stories of the three women deserve attention more serious than the adulation it received from antisweatshop NGOs...
...Despite the commitment of the lawyers and professionals on the staff of the GWC and the courage of the immigrant women, L.A.'s apparel industry is still nonunion, and no knowledgeable observer really believes that the 60 percent rate of sweatshop abuse in the small contractor shops has abated...
...It is a service and advocacy center...
...Individualism suffuses our understanding of worker rights...
...officially occupied about 112,000 people, twice as many as there are today...
...In the meantime, Made in L.A...
...Their stories appeal to us across the divides of ethnicity, gender, and class...
...Global Exchange—at the forefront of West Coast anti-sweatshop activities, hosted a premier showing of the film in San Francisco...
...Here is a film about a worker struggle that ignores labor rights in trade...
...The settlement avoided a final and possibly precedent-setting determination of the company's liability...
...We are in the midst of the breakup of the long winter's ice field of neoliberal ideology...
...clothing imports...
...At the end of the documentary their case is settled by the "fast-fashion" (that is, cheap and trendy) Forever 21 firm, and, according to unofficial reports, they are awarded back pay while the firm agrees to be law-abiding in the future...
...is the argument for some form of amnesty, oops, "path to citizenship," so that the exploitation of low-wage laborers can be combated by the laborers themselves, unafraid of deportation or jail...
...In essence, the film is the story of a lawsuit, not an organizing drive...
...In the few years from the filing of the suit to its settlement, L.A.'s apparel industry lost about 16,000 jobs...
...One study (by Janice Fine) found that although they are often able to win back pay for aggrieved workers, they are not able to have an impact on firms' ongoing wages or benefits or industry level conditions...
...Try as it might to empower workers and have them join in important decisions, it is neither an organization of the workers nor a thoroughgoing democratic organization...
...ordinance commits the city to sweat-free uniform purchases and also to an aggressive monitoring posture...
...The worker center strategy is understandable: today's garment, landscape, casual construction workers, and so on, are immigrants without meaningful rights...
...and California agencies, shows the median hourly earnings of L.A...
...Enthusiastically received by critics and activists in 2007 when it was broadcast on PBS's P.O.V...
...If global capitalism and the use of capital mobility to counter workers' leverage is in soft focus in this film, other even more contentious and difficult matters are buried...
...The L.A...
...Maria Pineda explains clearly to us how "her whole body hurt" under the abuses of the L.A...
...The marvelously energetic Sweatfree Communities Campaign, working for state and municipal sweatfree laws on public sector uniform purchases, features the film on its Web site and in its e-mails...
...17,170...
...and the desperate need for legal rights for all our workers...
...Whether it will deliver on labor's high hopes remains to be seen...
...In this case, though, the matter is even more complex...
...It is an old question, unexamined in the film, as to how popular movements and legal advocacy should interact...
...became known as the "Sweatshop Capital of the U.S...
...If we are conscious and mindful and willing to press the possibilities of the moment with great vigor, we might, years from now, recognize these as the dawning moments of a new chapter in working class history...
...At its height in 1997, apparel manufacturing in L.A...
...The details of implementation are still being worked out, but the city has engaged the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) in a pilot project for monitoring and remediation...
...The official hourly wage rate, overestimated because it is the product of false reporting by contractors to U.S...
...The global nature of the struggle against sweatshops is suggested in the film in an almost pathetic, symbolic fashion when Hernandez, having become an employee of the GWC, attends an anti-World Trade Organization demonstration in Hong Kong...
...The point to be made is perhaps too indirect: the rules of the world trade game guarantee investor rights but not worker rights...
...sweatshop workers was about 440,000...
...When the suit was settled, the terms—except for Forever 21's pledge of good behavior—were not disclosed, but a "financial settlement" has been referred to in the L.A...
...Despite the anecdotal reports of increasing wages in China's coastal regions, the cost per square meter of clothing imported from China in 2008 was lower than it had been five years before...
...or Managua...
...They need legal advocates, because, in so many ways, the system keeps them voiceless...
...On the other hand, the president's choice for U.S...
...The movie appeals to us as a triumphal story because courageous workers had their individual grievances vindicated...
...In the global "rag trade" there is a "race to the bottom" in labor standards, where China and other low-wage Asian countries define the bottom...
...Maura Colorado grapples with her shyness...
...sewing machine operators, at $7.50 an hour, below the federal poverty level for a three-person family ($15,600 vs...
...There is no evidence it had much impact...
...Though some of the 139 (as of 2005) worker centers had significant democratic input from workers, most are staff run...
...Working for $3 an hour in places where, Colorado says, "they throw your dignity to the floor," she and Pineda and Hernandez were part of an American garment sweatshop labor force of about 250,000 when the Forever 21 campaign began in 2001...
...Implicit but never expressed in Made in L.A...
...UNITE HERE, which includes the remnants of the apparel workers unions, no longer attempts to organize immigrant apparel workers outside of larger warehouses, industrial laundries, or uniform shops...
...sweating system...
...However, because they do not focus primarily on new laws or collective bargaining, the worker centers do not wield the strongest weapon of the state and do not prepare working-class people to defend themselves...
...has lost close to 25,000 of all its apparel manufacturing jobs—about 30 percent...
...Such a development would redound to the benefit of all workers who share the labor market that undocumented immigrants now populate...
...There are one thousand fewer shops in L.A...
...Goolsbee is the University of Chicago Business School economist and FOB—Friend of Barack—who met with the Canadian consul in Chicago to assure him that Obama's antiNAFTA rhetoric was mainly campaign talk...
...The essence of the case was that Forever 21 was responsible for the labor law violations of its contractors, because, in the words of Julia Figueira-McDonough, one of the workers' lawyers, "Forever 21 contracts with these entities knowing full well that the contract prices are not enough to allow them to pay legal wages...
...One of the GWC organizers claims that the publicity of the campaign was crucial in setting the stage for L.A.'s very strong 2004 anti-sweatshop ordinance...
...The three Latina women who occupy the film's center stage grow more confident and more dignified as their struggles deepen...
...The more progressive settlement houses were the result...
...since the end of the lawsuit, it has lost more than 8,000...
...Some forty-five other workers, toiling in contractor shops that supplied Forever 21—which would not settle— then associated themselves with the ongoing suit seeking pay and damages...
...The community-based worker center has been presented as a new form of organizing, particularly fit for the problems of immigrant workers in the twenty-first century...
...Early in the litigation, two manufacturers named in the original suit settled with nineteen workers for substantial back pay and made pledges of good behavior...
...Although it is a dramatic portrayal of human success, the film surfs on the surface of serious, unresolved strategic issues that hamper domestic opponents of sweatshop labor...
...faced abusive conditions in which unscrupulous employers were competing against other unscrupulous employers in Central America...
...garment district does raise questions about the strategic direction of such worker centers...
...County than there were in 2001...
...But even those Latina sisters, as others in the Western hemisphere, lived in nearby workers' districts in their own homes, part of a vibrant community life...
...At the outset of the Forever 21 campaign, Mexico and China held roughly equal 15 percent shares of U.S...
...does not prepare us for the sad fact that, despite their individual change and the relative success of their lawsuit, there has been no discernible positive result for L.A.'s apparel industry...
...But Made in L.A...
...after almost two decades, it is time to ask whether the strategy is working...
...the need for unions, not just advocacy centers...
...in the nineties...
...The GWC and the workers began a boycott of Forever 21 in 2001...
...Now, Chinese clothing imports command 32 percent of imports and Mexico 6 percent...
...Lupe Hernandez is inspired to become an organizer...
...What the film is not is a guide to strategy for the twenty-first century...
...Yet Made in L.A...
...Despite this, progressive audiences love it...
...seems reluctant to take on this issue...
...Everywhere—even among the accredited pundits of establishment conservatism—the need to be mindful of the collective good is accepted...
...Another large matter of cultural politics lurks behind our appreciation of this film: the representation of labor's struggle as a fight for individual rather than collective rights...
...the settlement came only after a federal appeals court allowed the case, previously dismissed, to be heard in a state court...
...The women maintain their commitment through a long legal struggle, and they come to sense their own ability to change their circumstance...
...follows three Los Angeles sweatshop workers as their lawsuit against a lowprice retail label and the community campaign to support them developed from 2001 through 2004...
...On September 19, 2008, the GWC released a press statement noting, "The experience of the garment workers that work with the GWC makes it abundantly clear, that the jobs they have sewing in factories which subcontract with [Forever 21] are sweatshop jobs, not good jobs...
...At the millennium, Lichtenstein pointed out, you could get fired for joining a union (and I might add, you had no legal right to go to a toilet), but you were protected against racial or gender discrimination as an individual employee...
...These issues involve the fight for jobs in the context of corporate globalization, the problem of creating democratic worker organizations that can fight for rights at work, and the fate of immigrants without official papers...
...By now it is under 175,000...
...It has been a long time...
...The three women and the GWC staffer featured in the film, Joann Lo, glow with courage and dedication...
...Today, the competition is in China and other low-wage Asian exporters...
Vol. 56 • April 2009 • No. 2
